Ramblings

Time is a horribly tricky thing. It may seem simple, tick-tocking along, but it’s really a slippery river with an endless number of currents that tug at your life and twist it around.

One day you’re rushed for time, and you find a stray dog. He’s sweet and friendly, so you devote time to finding him a home.

But he’s a pitbull mix. All the rescue shelters with space say the most time they could give him would be two days before putting him down. That’s not enough time for this big-headed dog who will not stop kissing you, so you reluctantly keep him.

You name him Monty. In the blink of an eye this undernourished mutt wins you over with his curiousity, his intelligence, and his determination. He gets into everything with an honest enthusiasm you can’t help but catch, and he quickly learns all the rules of the house for the express purpose of challenging them.

In a flash he has become your dear friend, with his loyalty, tenderness, and energy carrying you through anything the world throws at you. He wins over friend after friend with his antics and, of course, his big wet kisses.

In a twinkling he has become your Buddy, your confidant, your unwavering companion in all manner of mischief and exploration. Always at your side when you need him, always waiting patiently when you’re too busy. When you have time again for him, he has kisses ready to go.

In a heartbeat he has become such a part of your life you can’t recall a time when he wasn’t curled up warm and snoring at your feet. Then you realize that heartbeat was really a decade in the making, and his eyes are getting dim, his joints ache, and he has become very, very tired… but still he kisses you.

And you can’t understand where all the time has gone.

When time finally runs out, a million moments come rushing back to you. Wonderful, goofy, sweet, crazy, touching, and precious beyond words. They remind you that time falls apart when you look backwards at it. It must be viewed from the inside, with each individual moment being cherished for as long as they last.

And when you view these wonderful moments in their totality, you realize what an indescribably lucky person you were to have such a dear friend for so long.

Sometimes friendships only last the briefest of times, sometimes they last a lifetime.

Newer graves show off flowers or flags. There is someone still alive who cared about and remembers the person beneath the soil. A wife, a son, a grandchild, or a friend.

The older graves are barren. Dusty. Sometimes full of weeds. They get that way quickly. It takes just a few decades before everyone who once knew and loved that person is dead themselves. A few dozen years more and nobody will even remember their name.

Three graves together, nearly a century old: a child “Taken Too Soon“, a “Beloved Wife And Mother” dead the same year, and a year later the father “Resting With God and His Angels“. Was there an accident? A suicide borne from grief?

I doubt anyone alive knows more about them than me, a stranger walking by, reading the etched stone. Everything else they were is gone.

Meanwhile, the Living…

Karen Klein, a elderly bus monitor earning about $15,000 a year, was captured on video being harassed and bullied by the children on her school bus. The kids mocked her for her weight, her looks, her clothes, and even the deaths of her family members. Her son committed suicide ten years prior, and those comments reduced her to tears.

You can watch the video if you wish, but I don’t recommend it. I’ve been online a long time, and I’ve seen some amazingly bizarre, disgusting, horrible, vile, brutal, weird, and crazy things. With just words and insults, this video ranks as one of the worst of them.

People are raising money to give this poor woman a vacation. Their $5,000 goal was obliterated, and they are at $550,000 and climbing. It’s a nice gesture, and I’m happy for her, but it doesn’t make me feel any better about what happened.

Kids on a Bus

This woman still endured a horrible situation that nobody addressed until a video of it went viral. She had been bullied by these kids before, and nobody took action. These kids thought it was acceptable to threaten and mock this woman to tears. None of that has changed.

It’s easy to point fingers at the parents, or at the kids, or at the administrators, or… anybody. But the real anger is because stories like this make us doubt ourselves. How could one human just be so hurtful to another?

That’s why the donation is so high – what happened to Karen taps into our collective guilt over how poorly we can behave as human beings. We’re trying to apologize on behalf of humanity for every time we were cruel as children, mean to someone who didn’t deserve it, or stood by and didn’t defend someone who needed it.

We’re not apologizing to Karen, we’re apologizing to ourselves. To the universe. “I know we’re a mean little species sometimes, but we don’t want to be, and we can do much better than that… right?”

We know this part of us. We know it, and we hate it.

Taking Time

We can’t make it go away. We can do things like financing Karen’s retirement, and supporting anti-bullying organizations like the It Gets Better Project and Stand for the Silent, but the biggest thing we can do is always be on guard against that cold piece of ourselves. We’re too often focused on the race, the grind, the competition, and the acquisition. None of those things endure, but they often fuel the part of us the kids on the bus put on display.

I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.
~ Banksy

You’re not going to matter forever. In a hundred years someone may lovingly place flowers upon your grave. They might do it many times, but eventually they will stop coming and the flowers will give way to weeds.

The only time in which you matter is right now. Right where you are. To the people around you.

How you treat them, and the impact you have on their lives in this brief sliver of time together, is your real legacy.

Have a care with others. Never back down from defending someone who needs it.

In a nearly unprecedented event, when I decided to go for a run this morning I felt really good about the prospect. This was new ground for me, but I decided to roll with it. I stretched out, warmed up, and resolved to pour it on and see what I could do to break my personal records for one of my routes.

I continued to feel good the entire way. My calves grumbled a bit, but my knee didn’t complain at all. It was a beautiful morning, and I hauled some ass.

When I got back home, sweaty and satisfied, I checked RunKeeper to see how I did.

It said I had a grand speed of 0.00 mph for most of my run.

WTF? On the best run I’ve had in a year is when the app decides to crap out on me? I have no idea how I did, and I have no stats to post to Twitter, Facebook, or this blog!

All I was left with was a strong run on a gorgeous morning through tree-lined streets as the sun came up and the birds were singing.

At every family function the cameras come out to take dozens of pictures we’ll never look at again. An hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.

We create more content than we’ll ever consume and get lost in the noise. Without intent and focus, volume rushes in to take the place of quality.

I’m the King of taking on too much. It’s not that I lack the ability to say No, but that ability is overwhelmed by knowing so many interesting people, doing fascinating things, and having a seemingly endless stream of exciting and/or screwy things I want to try.

If every single thing I was currently doing or working on disappeared, with all the other stuff I want to do but lack the time I’d be just as busy as I am now.

To compound the problem, connecting people and ideas in new ways is both a strength and a pleasure of mine. Having a million things going on leads to serendipity I wouldn’t otherwise have. Of course, it also leads to more things I want to do. Rinse, drown, repeat.

So it’s time to purge.

In the next week I’m going to gut my RSS feed, and sort out just what combination of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ makes sense.

I’m going to get medieval on my project list and see what things I need to drop or rearrange.

I’m going to carve out time for some things that have suffered horribly – working out, reading, writing, drawing, and learning guitar.

I’m going to get back to just a few daily and weekly tasks to keep focused.

Part of this daily post writing project (I’m now 3 behind, I think) is to shake things up and help force me to reevaluate my time and how I spend it. I’m sure I’ll get all jammed up again eventually, but that’s just part of the process.

For right now I just need to get back down to doing a few things well rather than killing myself trying to do dozens of things half-way. It’s going to be painful to get there, but worth it when I do.

I work on an event called Ignite Phoenix, in which 18 presenters go on stage to share their passions in 5-minute talks. We fill an 850 seat theater, manage tickets, create tshirts and programs, bring in local bands and food trucks, live-stream it in HD, and have an incredible evening. It takes a core team of about ten volunteers, and an extended team of about another dozen people, months of planning, meetings, fund raising, and coordination to create what I (admittedly biased) think is one of the best grass-roots events in Phoenix.

As things were winding down at Ignite Phoenix last Friday someone came up to me after the show and said “You probably hear this all the time, but that was a great show. Thanks for all your hard work putting it on!”

I replied quite honestly that No, we don’t hear it all the time but we always appreciate it when we do. I had someone else come to me and say she had been coming to our events for nearly two years but only just now got around to saying Hello.

We get a fair amount of kudos and recognition, but a lot of it is online. And when you work on something big you will always get complainers, who even if they are few in number are usually loud and bitchy.

It never fails to make my day to have someone come up to me personally and say Thank You.

Sadly, I’m guilty of not doing this often enough myself. If I have bad service at a restaurant I’ll complain quickly, but how often do I stop and give extra thanks when it is great?

Saying Thank You is a little thing that can mean a lot. Never pass up an opportunity to tell someone you appreciate what they do, even if you think they’ve heard it before.